Context
Performance
- Instrumentation
- -- 3*3*22 4330 00 0 str
- Classification
- Orkester
- Subject heading
- Xl
- Language
First performance
- Date
- 1995-08-06
- Location
- Tammerfors
- Performers
- Orkester Norden 1995, dir Esa-Pekka Salonen
Background
- Commissioned by
- Svenska Rikskonserter
- Comments about the work
- The sense which Anders Hillborg has for sound and form is to be experienced in Liquid Marble, composed for Orkester Norden. The harmony is constructed around a kind of distorted partial tone spectrum in which for instance the first interval has been compressed from an octave into a tritonus. The result is a peculiar dissonant sound, in some places reinforced by the microtonal pitch demanded now and then. If we look at this harmony as a liquid marble it is interesting to observe how Hillborg turns it into dramatic, suggestive and comical effects.The piece starts in a kind of ascending cascades of sound which bubble up from the somber bottom of the double basses. Crying hysterically they are held back when reaching the highest pitch of the clarinets. Rather soon the cascades are transformed into rapid scale figures in which the woodwinds and the strings go opposite directions. When the brass gently enters there is a successive return to a section, which is less dizzy but far from stagnant. This scenario is repeated: first the cascades of sound which seem to stretch the clarinets to the point of bursting, then descending scale figures in the woodwind. But instead of bringing ascending scales something astonishing is taking shape in the strings. Softly and without notice in the shadow of the scales of the woodwind starts a dance, almost spastic in which syncopated sixteenth notes soon entice both brass and woodwind into an ever-stronger ecstasy. Hillborg himself has characterized this section as a ragtime, but in this peculiar context it rather sounds as if he has joined both Scott Joplin and Stravinsky in a surrealistic transcendence: rag raised to rave-time.Be it so or not, this excited state does not last for ever and soon the well-known scales resume command and lead the excesses to a definite point. Like a vague echo of the past the oboes and the flutes seem to take a sentimental, almost tear-jerking farewell before the sound cascades from the beginning stir up again. As it was in the beginning these cascades once again are followed by the scales of the woodwind which is now let at loose. In attack after attack ever more energy is accumulated in these alternately ascending and descending movements. When the strings are at last absorbed in the maelstrom and the restrained brass sounds die away you ask yourself how this will all end – will the tempo be slowed down to a quiet final coda or will it escalate until the musicians die from a heart attack?Remarkably enough neither nor occurs. The phenomenon you experience as a listener is that both the musical time and the musical room seem to dissolve. In absence of contrasting points of reference – against which pulse and harmonic events could be articulated earlier – the evolution looses direction and comes to a standstill. In spite of a collective tutta forza no confirming climax is reached. The music becomes its own universe without gravitation where the liquid marble is implacably absorbed by the black hole of the last thirty-second-note.Ulrik Volgsten, transl Jan Olof Rudén
List
The work
- Composer
- Title
- Liquid marble
- Duration
- 10 minutes
- Composition year
- 1995
Information
- Identification number
- 101635
- Publication year
- 2016
- Work administrator
-
Faber Music (Faber Music Ltd)
Burnt Mill. Elizabeth Way
Harlow, Essex CM20 2HX
Phone: +44 (012)1279 828989
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.fabermusic.com - Format
- SCORE
- Reference to physical copy
- L-fol